Fair Trade: The Language of Love and Commerce in Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Abstract

Fair Trade: The Language of Love and Commerce in Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark CYNTHIA RICHARDS If we know Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, we know it largely through reputation. It is the book that won William Godwin's heart. Godwin himself endows it with this status: "If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author," he writes in the Memoirs, "this appears to be the book."1 And apparently, Godwin was not alone in succumbing to its charms. As Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd note in the introduction to The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, the book "moved and haunted the leading men writers of her generation.... and several of the women too."2 Thomas Holcroft purportedly proposes after reading the Letters Written in Sweden, and although Robert Southey does not go that far, the language of his praise suggests an equally strong response: upon reading the Letters he proclaims no woman her equal and professes: "She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow with a northern moonlight."3 Thus, through reputation, this book has become a "conquest narrative," of the amorous sort, famous not so much for what it says, but for how it was received. We can't help but read the letters looking for some clue as to why Godwin fell in love (and did so, after finding Wollstonecraft rather unpleasant company upon their first meeting) and how Wollstonecraft, with apparently no calculation, managed to accomplish this considerable end. In other words, we read it looking for some power, aesthetic or perhaps 71 72 / RICHARDS purely sentimental, that transcends the particularities of its composition and which models an ideal union between writer and reader or subject and object of address. For when the reader falls in love, the text's power is figured as absolute yet non-coercive, the writer remains exposed, vulnerable even in this feat of total persuasion. The critical reception of the Letters Written in Sweden has, by and large, continued in this romantic vein. Ralph Wardle calls the Letters "Mary's most mature and most delightful book," showing "how truly charming she could be when relaxed."4 Indeed, her biographers are uniform in their praise, finding in this text the most appealing, and not incidentally the most true, representation of Wollstonecraft, "the whole person."5 Gary Kelly, in his intellectual biography Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft, speaks of this work's merits in less "intimate" terms than Wardle, but still distinguishes it for its effective synthesis of objective] and subjective] knowledge: for Kelly, the Letters bring the "arguments and experience together in one text," offering up a portrait of the "female philosopher" in her most compelling pose.6 Yet the Letters are persuasive, Mary Poovey argues, precisely because they are so seemingly without design : her plot remains largely unrevealed in the work itself, her emotional development instead taking precedence.7 As Syndy Conger succinctly explains , "There is a sense of the narrator's mind—emotion and intellection —wholly shared."8 Thus, in our expressions of admiration for this last and most successful of Wollstonecraft's "authorized" texts, we remain indebted to a language of romantic correspondence. In the Letters, we find Wollstonecraft most affecting because most unaffected, our own reactions paying implicit homage to Godwin's personal feelings about the book. Yet any discussion of this book's public reception necessarily evokes its private (and far more tragic) one. For, of course, the text has become almost as famous for being a failed conquest narrative, of the amorous sort. The letters written during this short residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (both those which remained "private" and those which assumed this curious semi-personal form) we now know to have had little or no effect on their intended reader—Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft's lover and the father of her illegitimate child, Fanny. Once again, it appears we have Godwin to thank for the public perception of the text's ultimate "failure." Upon its publication, readers would certainly have...